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Flight of the Red Balloon (2007)

Review #1,307

THE SCOOPDirector: Hou Hsiao-HsienCast: Juliette Binoche, Hippolyte Girardot, Simon Iteanu, Song FangPlot: A little boy and his baby-sitter inhabit the same imaginary world: through their adventures they are followed by a strange red balloon.Genre: DramaAwards: Nom. for Un Certain Regard Award (Cannes).Runtime: 115minRating: PGInternational Sales: Films DistributionIN RETROSPECT (Spoilers: NO)

Screened in 35mm as part of the ‘Also Like Life: The Films of Hou Hsiao-Hsien’ retrospective at the National Museum of Singapore.A
companion piece to Café Lumiere
(2003), which was shot in Japan, Flight
of the Red Balloon, very loosely based on the Oscar-winning short The Red Balloon (1956) by French
director Albert Lamorisse, is unsurprisingly filmed in the beautiful city of
Paris.

Hou
Hsiao-Hsien's two travelogue pictures are interesting entries in his
illustrious filmography, though one might regard them as minor works. Still, there's a sense that Hou is trying to
experiment with what's cinematically possible, largely through natural sound in
Cafe Lumiere, and visually in Flight of the Red Balloon.

The
image of a floating red balloon is enigmatic if also symbolic. It has such unbridled freedom that we can
only envy. However, its aimlessness also
suggests a disconnect with anything meaningful.
I think this tension of wanting to be free—and happy, while also
desiring some kind of rooted meaning to our existence is possibly what Hou is
attempting to unravel.

I
don't think the film has any answers, nor does it achieve anything substantial,
but Red Balloon perhaps suggests we
need our own green man—there's a meta-filmic moment alluding to CG technology
when a person in a green suit is seen holding the red balloon.

Juliette
Binoche's anchoring performance as Suzanne, a divorced mother who lives with
her young kid, is excellent. She is
feisty, stressed out and possibly on the verge of a nervous breakdown. She hires a Chinese lady as a temporary
caretaker for her son, while she works as a voice artist for a niche French
puppet performance troupe.

Hou's
inclusion of puppetry may immediately draw a connection to his masterpiece, The Puppetmaster(1993), but its
inclusion here seems rather forced, especially when he tries to introduce a cross-cultural
element by having Suzanne mentored by a veteran Taiwanese puppet master.

While
largely languidly-paced, Red Balloon
is also somewhat unsure of its direction.
I would like to think that it is symptomatic of its meandering nature,
as if the film is mirroring the very visual motif that it is obsessed with. Ultimately, Hou's film falls short, and I
think it's rather obvious that the Cannes Film Festival felt the same way too
by relegating it to the less prestigious Un Certain Regard category.

Verdict:
Shot in France and starring Juliette Binoche in an excellent
performance, this is however a minor work by Hou that doesn’t quite achieve
anything substantial.